Remembering ornaments on African sculpture, wreath on the...

1of 4Jeremy Stone photographed at her home in San Francisco, Calif. Monday, December 18, 2017.Photo: Mason Trinca, Special to The Chronicle

2of 4A family snapshot showing Allan Stone’s living room, filled with art that would be festooned with ornaments at Christmas.Photo: Courtesy Jeremy Stone

3of 4Allan Stone in his living room, which overflowed with art. With no room for a tree, at Christmas the family would hang ornaments from the sculpture.Photo: Courtesy Jeremy Stone

4of 4A family snapshot showing Allan Stone’s living room, filled with art that would be festooned with ornaments at Christmas.Photo: Courtesy Jeremy Stone

Jeremy Stone, 59, remembers two kinds of Christmas growing up. Her father, Allan Stone, was destined to become a famous art dealer and collector. In the early days, however, after he left law and started his gallery on a $5,000 investment, he collected mostly artist friends.

At that time, she said, Stone bought a house in Westchester County, N.Y.: “This old, sort of rambling house that had actually been abandoned by the prior family because they thought it was too big.” In the first five years, at the holidays, “we only had a pingpong table and a Christmas tree in the living room. The artists from the gallery would come in and decorate the tree with us. My father tried to get as big a tree as possible, so the rooms wouldn’t look so empty. ... (He) was really struggling and we were really broke.”

Later, however, Allan Stone became famous for his vast collection. At his death — just before Christmas in 2006 — the New York Times reported that he was “perhaps as well known for amassing art as for selling it.” His Allan Stone Gallery and his home “teemed with primitive and folk art, no matter what exhibition was formally on view. At one point, he owned untold numbers of de Koonings and nearly 30 Bugatti automobiles.”

Now, the rooms of the home were filled with so much art, there was no longer anywhere to put a tree, said Jeremy Stone, who ran her own gallery in San Francisco and is now an art appraiser and estate planning consultant. “We hung ornaments off the African sculptures, and tied red ribbon or placed a wreath on the Gaudí bench.

“My stepmother was the one who loved Christmas. My father, who was Jewish though he didn’t practice, didn’t care that much ... no Hanukkah anywhere in sight, ever.”

She remembers her dad reaching deeply into a brown paper bag to dig out unwrapped presents — “jewelry he bought at discount, because he had six daughters and a wife to buy for.”

Typically, Stone’s second wife, Clare, would bake holiday cookies as ornaments, which the family’s chocolate Labrador retrievers, Bomber and Bruiser, promptly devoured when they were not being watched. Or, as the family exchanged gifts in the living room, the dogs would eat the Christmas Day roast on the dining room table, “and anything they could find in our suitcases and Christmas stockings.”

Charles Desmarais received the 2017 Rabkin Prize for Visual Arts Journalism and was awarded an Art Critic’s Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979. He spent the years between as an avid lover of art, friend of artists and leader of arts institutions.

Desmarais joined The Chronicle in 2016, having come to the Bay Area in 2011 as President of the San Francisco Art Institute. Prior to his move here, he was Deputy Director for Art at the Brooklyn Museum from 2004 to 2011, where he oversaw 10 curatorial departments, as well as the museum’s education, exhibitions, conservation and library activities.

As a museum director, Desmarais has served at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (1995-2004); the Laguna Art Museum (1988-1994); and the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside (1981-1988).

His extensive experience as an art writer includes articles in Afterimage, American Art, Art in America, California magazine, Grand Street, and elsewhere. He authored a regular column, “On Art,” for the Riverside Press-Enterprise from 1987 to 1988.